Yes, Writing and Reading Are Social Acts

In a Commentary in the Feb. 13, 1991, issue, the writer and former
teacher Susan Ohanian took aim at the trend toward teaching
"collaboratively" what are to her essentially solitary
pursuits--reading and writing. The following response, written as an
open letter to Ms. Ohanian, begins with reference to one example cited
in the original essay, a group-centered writing workshop from which Ms.
Ohanian made a hasty retreat--a retreat remarked upon by the group
leader, "an earnest-looking type straight out of the L.L. Bean
catalogue."

Dear Susan:

I grant that the writing workshop you once attended at that New York
State convention began very badly; assuredly, neither I nor endless
others I know who conduct such occasions would have commented upon your
departure. (I don't quite get the significance of the sartorial
comment, however, the comment on the clothing the workshop leader was
wearing: do you prefer Land's End or James River to L.L. Bean? Or do
you think a teacher earning perhaps $29,000 a year should have been
wearing Armani?)

But to attend to your message, if I can unpack it. May I rephrase?
1) As a highly sophisticated, published adult writer, you write alone.
2) More, you hate to share work in progress. 3) Others over history who
have written in solitude and felt as you do include Darwin, Rilke, and
Kafka. 4) Collaboration means ghostwriting with The Donald. 5) A deaf
child you once taught did not profit from classroom exchanges,
including those you initiated. Summarizing, collaboration is just one
more chic and politically correct gimmick that will soon pass, like,
say, teaching women's studies.

Have you been reading at all in the fields of English studies and of
cognitive science lately--oh, say, the last 20 years, Susan--I mean the
theory, the research, and the statements and guidelines based on both
emanating from our major professional organizations?

Most of our practices now for teaching writing and reading
acknowledge significant, widely accepted theory and research. Learning
language in any of its aspects, from talking to listening to writing to
reading, we regard as inevitably social processes, by which we mean
simply, requiring the collaboration of others since we don't have any
evidence that without interaction with another, often an adult, we
develop very well even as babies initially learning the language.
Indeed, we--psychologists anthropologists, English educators,
linguists--actually define language as the social construction of
meaning. We have longitudinal studies of children from around the world
demonstrating that they learn most happily and efficiently in settings
which are interactive, between teacher and child, between child and
child.

Gordon Wells, who made one of these studies in England, puts it this
way in The Meaning Makers: "[L]earning itself involves an active
reconstruction of the knowledge or skill that is presented, on the
basis of the learner's existing internal model of the world. The
process is therefore essentially interactional in nature, both within
the learner and between the learner and the teacher, and calls for the
negotiation of meaning, not its unidirectional transmission."

Perhaps the most influential theorist in all this for school
curriculum, development, and practice in the 80's and 90's is Lev
Vygotsky. What so many of us in the profession find compelling in his
work is his concept of the zone of proximal development, which at one
point he summarizes succinctly as "what a child can do in cooperation
today, he can do alone tomorrow." The notion here is that children can
initially, perhaps for a long time, learn more with aid from a teacher,
or, shocking though it may seem, from a peer, than from working alone.
Psychologists, like Jerome Bruner and his colleagues, have conducted
careful experiments that confirm that older can tutor younger to great
effect. Sociolinguists like Shirley Brice Heath and many, many others,
report comparable findings.

According to all these inquiries, we can serve each other well,
forwarding the other's intentions; helping the other see possibilities
in certain organizations of thoughts and words the speaker or writer
might not see alone; acting as audiences, as readers, who need more
rhetorical help than the person in a given conversation or draft has
yet provided and telling the writer, say, quite precisely the help we
need, all in order to enhance and improve what she wants to
accomplish.

I'm not certain, Susan, since collaboration to you seems to have
quisling overtones--if not actually traitorous, at least dubious as an
intellectual activity--that you have met this definition of
collaboration that is so widely shared in the profession. We would
regard the following then as specific instances of collaboration: a
tutor helping a 3-year-old build a pyramid of blocks through the
judicious use of a question; a 6-year-old reading her story to another
1st grader; a mother forwarding her infant's growth of syntax by
elaboration; 10th graders serving as audience for a classmate's report
about to be published in a class anthology; college sophomores writing
a shared response to a case study of a fatal hazing on campus. I'm
afraid we actually include here as collaboration, Susan, any valid act
of teaching.

As for citing Rilke, Kafka, and Darwin as cases of solitary writers,
I have trouble using them as exemplars of how all writers write since I
don't understand what the consideration of three of the most
neurasthenic genius writers from other cultures has to do with helping
as many American children as possible become literate enough to
comprehend their tortuously complex world and to write well enough to
control, and perhaps to change, that world. How do you respond to the
substantiated volumes of international research by such writers as
Barnes, Burke, Calkins, Dyson, the Goodmans, Graves,Harste, Murray,
Rosen and by the myriad teacher-researchers from the National Writing
Project and the Bread Loaf network that children and adults become
better writers through sharing their writing with teachers and
peers?

If I were to ask you to think of collaboration this way, I wonder if
even you might acknowledge that throughout your lifetime your writing
and reading have profited from the help of many collaborators. Mine
would include my grandmother to whom I first read my stories, my great
aunt who taught me to read, 20 to 30 teachers (yes, I did go to school
too long) not only of English but of zoology, history, and art; all my
friends in and out of seminars who listened to unwritten ranting as
well as read unleavened drafts that would never rise. Do you ever
dedicate your writing to anyone? If you do, why?

And I haven't even turned to contemporary literary theory that
insists that reading, too, is a social act; that insists upon the roles
others play when we read. Some of these theories actually propose that
when we read, Susan, we readers collaboratively create the sonnet that
Rilke wrote; that without us in a quite literal as well as a very real
aesthetic sense, that sonnet would not exist. By these theories, Susan,
it might turn out that you would need even me this very critical reader
as your inevitable collaborator!

I like how Lucy Calkins puts these matters in her acknowledgments at
the beginning of her lyrical guide, The Art of Teaching Writing: "Alan
Purves has said, 'It takes two to read a book,' and for me it is true
that the books I remember are those I have talked about. The truth is
that I learn best when I am a part of a community. Although I can see
for myself that the forsythia bushes are in bloom and feel the new
energy for writing that comes from them, It is only when I tell this to
my colleagues that I see the implications for classrooms. ... My
writing process, then, does not begin with jotted notes or rough drafts
but rather with relationships within a community of learners."

If you had asked me to read your Commentary in draft, Susan, to
serve as your collaborator, I think I might have posed the following
questions. First, rhetorically, does it worry you that you have set up
a straw binary--collaboration versus solitude? that your essay suggests
that those of us who at times sponsor collaboration do not believe that
writing, including our own, is often a painfully solitary act? At the
same time, even with this relatively short piece, I find I have to
thank 20 people who have responded to some draft or other, including my
current marvelous graduate seminar who have just read their
Vygotsky.

Second, I have the oddest feeling that you are really writing about
something else, what I don't know: that collaboration has become your
metaphor for all you currently find abhorrent in American education.
What's really bothering you, Susan?

For all the reasons I have cited, our professional organizations
have developed guidelines that honor the worth of collaboration as I
have characterized it here. In 1987, for example, eight of the major
professional organizations in English and language arts, such as the
Modern Language Association and the National Council of Teachers of
English, formed a Coalition for the Future of Teaching English, a
coalition of elementary, secondary, and college teachers, who
formulated a number of guidelines for the teaching of English in the
1990's and into the 21st century. Here are just two that the
professions adopted:

Learning is the process of actively constructing meaning from
experience, including encounters with a broad range of print and
non-print texts.

Others--parents, teachers, and peers--help learners construct
meanings by serving as supportive models, providing frames and
materials for inquiry, helping create and modify hypotheses, and
confirming the worth of the venture.

Recently, Susan, I have been deeply moved by an account I have been
reading about women and teaching, Bitter Milk by Madeleine R. Grumet.
In her full page of acknowledgments she writes: "Acknowledgment
provides the emblem for the project of this text. Lodged right in this
middle of this term that we extend to honor the people who have
influenced and cared for us, is the word 'acknowledge.' An
acknowledgment is an admission. It makes explicit what is tacit, or
sometimes, denied, in every scholarly monologue: none of us knows
alone."

Do you agree, Susan?

Janet Emig was president of the National Council of Teachers of English
in 1989, and in 1983 received the Mina Shaughnessy Medal for Research
in Literature and Language from the Modern Language Association. She
teaches at Rutgers University.

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